Matt Taibbi

I really, really, really didn’t want to talk about Donald Trump. I was going to write about the Houston debate, which was one hell of an ugly scene in which moderators begged the candidates in vain for some kind of order and sanity

How private companies make billions off of immigrants and how one woman seeks to soften the blow and offer some peace – or rather, paz. View the full episode @ActOutOnOccupy facebook.com/ActOutOnOccupy…

Abby Martin speaks with Rolling Stone journalist, Matt Taibbi, about a JP Morgan Chase whistleblower that has come forward to expose how the company knowingly sold toxic mortgages to investors and how…

The inimitable Matt Taibbi takes on the drones issue for Rolling Stone: Read an absolutely amazing article today. Entitled “Droning on about Drones,” it was published in the online version of Dawn, Pakistan’s…

Maybe there will be a silver lining to the increasingly apparent 2012 End Times – Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi suggests that apocalyptic madness might well sink the Republican candidates: I’m submitting a memo…

These A-holes are no longer happy with the “Greed is Good” mantra? Kicking it up to the Almighty now? Great job ducking those questions from Congress today. Matt Taibbi, who’s been excellent on speaking the truth behind the so-called financial “crisis,” writes in the Guardian:

The investment bank’s cult of self-interest is on trial against the whole idea of civilisation — the collective decision by all of us not to screw each other over even if we can.

So Goldman Sachs, the world’s greatest and smuggest investment bank, has been sued for fraud by the American Securities and Exchange Commission. Legally, the case hangs on a technicality.

Morally, however, the Goldman Sachs case may turn into a final referendum on the greed-is-good ethos that conquered America sometime in the 80s – and in the years since has aped other horrifying American trends such as boybands and reality shows in spreading across the western world like a venereal disease.

When Britain and other countries were engulfed in the flood of defaults and derivative losses that emerged from the collapse of the American housing bubble two years ago, few people understood that the crash had its roots in the lunatic greed-centered objectivist religion, fostered back in the 50s and 60s by ponderous emigre novelist Ayn Rand.

Wall Street’s journalist nemesis Matt Taibbi reveals how the nation’s biggest banks, this time with J.P. Morgan at the head of the pack rather than Taibbi’s usual bad guys from Goldman Sachs, are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece, in Rolling Stone:

If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama.

Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff’s precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.

As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260.

One year after the great collapse of our financial system, Wall Street is back on top while our politicians dither. As for health care reform, you’re about to be forced to buy insurance from companies whose stock is soaring, and that’s just dandy with the White House.

Truth is, our capitol’s being looted, republicans are acting like the town rowdies, the sheriff is firing blanks, and powerful Democrats in Congress are in cahoots with the gang that’s pulling the heist. This is not capitalism at work. It’s capital. Raw money, mounds of it, buying politicians and policy as if they were futures on the hog market.

Here to talk about all this are two journalists who don’t pull their punches. Robert Kuttner is an economist who helped create and now co-edits the progressive magazine THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, and the author of the book OBAMA’S CHALLENGE, among others…